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Reedsburg is home to the Museum of Norman Rockwell Art with almost 4,000 of the original magazine covers, calendars, story illustrations, advertisements and other memorabilia on
display.
Viewers can delight in every slice of Americana from the pre-World War I era to modern day Rock Stars, all captured by Norman Rockwell's brush.
Rockwell was born in New York City on February 3, 1894. During a career that spanned seven decades, Norman Rockwell was extremely prolific, creating over 2,600 published illustrations and the many color and charcoal studies used to develop these final images.
Relatively few Rockwell works were non-commissioned; even portraits of his family members and friends were sometimes done as illustrations for publication. In other cases, the ideas behind an illustration were taken directly from Rockwell’s personal experiences.
However, especially in his later years, Rockwell did some painting and sketching that was not on commission. Many of these landscapes and portraits were done on his extensive travels. Others were created as part of an art class he took in the early 1960's in an effort to get himself out of his studio and improve his work.
Rockwell rarely used watercolor in his illustration work but did use it as well as oils in his travel paintings. These works, done directly from life and without studies, have a freshness and spontaneity not found in Rockwell’s final illustrations, and they also are more impressionistic and less detailed.
Museum of Norman Rockwell Art
227 South Park Street
Reedsburg, WI 53959
608-524-2123
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